Dr Tom Whyman

Personal Statement

I studied for my PhD in Philosophy at the University of Essex, and before coming here spent one year teaching at Warwick, two years teaching at Hull, and two years teaching at Durham. Around and in between my academic career, I've also worked extensively as a freelance writer.

My work is heavily influenced by Frankfurt School critical theory (the good and interesting first generation of Frankfurt School theory represented by Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Marcuse, not what came after), as well as the so-called 'Oxford Quartet' (the great generation of Anglophone moral philosophers who studied together at Oxford in the late 30s and early 40s: G.E.M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch). But I also have expertise in post-Kantian continental philosophy more generally (especially philosophy from Kant to Kierkegaard - including Marx). Mostly I'm interested in what 'the human being' is, what 'nature' is, and how our understanding of these things is transformed by the fact of the climate crisis. Relatedly, I am interested in the ethics of parenthood (again in the context of the climate crisis).

In 2021, I published my first book - a philosophical memoir about fatherhood and the concept of hope, and in 2022 I published a new creative abridgement of Marx and Engels's 'The German Ideology'.

Outside of philosophy I like reading literature, writing about art, and trying to figure out how the world seems from the perspective of my two small (though increasingly large) and energetic children.